Review: Death’s Mistress by Karen Chance

Reviewed by Jen

Love. I Love this series with a capital L.

If you haven’t read Midnight’s Daughter, the first installment, you need to start there. This book picks up where that one leaves off. There is a brand new story arc, but the relationships are under development. Let’s face it. I’m a sucker for the relationships. But there is so much more this book has to offer.

As the story begins, Dory is working as a gun for hire, killing rouge vamps for the vampire senate. Louis-Cesare is MIA and roommate Claire is off having her baby in Fairie. Dorina takes what seems to be a simple job for her father, when all hell breaks loose. Someone else is after her quarry, and it sends Dory on the run with a talking head in a duffel bag, trying to get back to dear old dad.

At the same time, Claire makes a sudden reappearance –baby in tow– on the run from some Fae trying to kill her son. Someone has stolen an ancient rune, designed to protect the little boy until he can grow up and take the Fae throne. Now, the rune is somewhere on the Earthly plane and everybody wants it. Claire. Some really bad Fae dudes. Mircea. Louis-Cesare. Everyone. As a result, Dory is thrown in the middle of the search for the rune. And it seems like she’s in mortal danger at every turn.

There is so much action. It’s like Dory is running a different gauntlet in every other chapter. That keeps the pace moving like a freight train. But it’s the characters that make the book so fantastic. Dory is so powerful on the outside and so very fragile on the inside. She has tried to deaden herself to hundreds of years of rejection but it underlies everything she does. It impacts every relationship she has. And it’s her interactions with the wonderfully drawn secondary characters (as well as her internal monologue) that really resonate.

Louis Cesare is so much like Dory. At first glance they would seem polar opposites. But the reason they speak to each other on such a deep level is because like recognizes like. Their relationship is so powerful to me. Just as important is Dory’s relationship with Mircea. He’s a character I never really cared for in the Cassie books, but here I find him much more sympathetic. I believe in his love for his daughter every bit as much as I believe in her fear of his rejection. Big feels.

It’s not perfect. I saw the villain reveal coming a mile away. And there was a very incongruous chapter with flying cars that really lost me. But overall, I thought it was really good. I think any UF fan should give it a go.